Wilmington-based actor busy saving the world

Thursday

Jun 20, 2013 at 2:13 PM

David Andrews plays a Navy captain in 'World War Z.'

By Ben SteelmanBen.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com

Wilmington-based actor David Andrews hasn't been in town much lately. He's been busy saving the world.Andrews plays a Navy captain in "World War Z," the $200 million zombie epic (based on the best seller by Max Brooks) that opens Friday in movie houses nationwide."I command this aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic," Andrews explained in a phone interview Thursday, "that's at the center of this ad hoc flotilla of fishing boats, freighters and even a Carnival cruise liner."The president is dead, the vice president is missing, four of the Joint Chiefs are dead, so I'm the only authority there is."As such, Andrews gets to order United Nations employee Gerry Lane (played by Brad Pitt) into action to find some sort of response to the spreading zombie pandemic."It's a real intensive ride through this collapsing world," Andrews said.Pitt, he added, was "pretty down to Earth. He didn't come with a huge entourage, and he was very open to what we were trying to figure out."Andrews filmed most of his scenes over 2½ weeks in the port town of Falmouth, England, with some green-screen reshooting in Los Angeles and a little post-production work in Wilmington. Much of his work was on what he described as "quite a chaotic, beautiful set" with more than 400 extras – some of them actual U.S. and British Special Forces personnel.This is supposed to be the war room in the hold of Andrews' ship, where monitors count down what humanity has left: just 200 days of food, 90 days of water. "I'm the one who tells Gerry, ‘You need to go,'?" he said. "I'm the mama bird pushing the baby bird out of the next."The buff, 60-year-old Baton Rouge native has found himself often typecast as a military man. He played astronaut Pete Conrad in "Apollo 11" and astronaut Frank Borman in HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon." For one season, he played Maj. Gen. Biff Cresswell, commanding the Navy and Marine Corps lawyers in the long-running CBS TV series "JAG."Andrews has co-starred in such films as "Fight Club," "Terminator 3" and "Hannibal." He played Scooter Libby in the 2010 feature "Fair Game" and played Sheriff Napier on the FX crime drama "Justified."Ironically, he life nearly took another turn entirely. A summa cum laude graduate of Louisiana State, Andrews graduated from the Stanford University law school and actually practiced law in California before taking what he describes as a "hard-right" turn into acting.Andrews has been on the Wilmington scene for nearly two decades, since coming to film the TV movie "Sophie & the Moonhanger." He's appeared in episodes of "Dawson's Creek" and "Surface," acted in the locally-filmed "A Walk to Remember" and played Bill O'Halloran in NBC's "Revolution."He co-starred as the golf-course owner in the locally filmed "Arthur Newman," which Andrews said gave him a chance to chat and talk shop with Colin Firth.For him, however, "World War Z" is something special.The film "takes a slightly different wrinkle on the zombies," he said, but he argues the film has something that many zombie movies lack: heart."The atmosphere in American today is very divisive," Andrews said. "So much of entertainment is dog-eat-dog – all these reality shows and contest shows pit one person against another, sometimes in a base way."In ‘World War Z,' people are faced with the most dire circumtances, and they have to come together for the basic fact of survival. I think this is going to touch people in a way they don't get touched very often."On Monday, Andrews, his wife and son attended the "World War Z" premiere in New York, navigating crowds in Times Square.Meanwhile, his career isn't slowing down. On the recently premiered third season of USA's "Necessary Roughness," he plays a "hard-nosed" pro football coach who fires psychotherapist Dani Santino (actress Callie Thorne) from the team. "I think they wanted to shake up the show," he said. The move allows Dani to take a job with a high-powered sports agency that also works with actors.Andrews also is slated to co-star in "Crisis," a new NBC series scheduled to debut in 2014. He'll play Hurst, a veteran Secret Service agent assigned to guard the president's son. In the first episode, the son – and his entire class – are kidnapped.In the meantime, Andrews is still looking for challenges. One of his favorite projects, he said, was a small 2012 indie film, "Don't Know Yet," written and directed by UNCW's Terry Linehan. In it, he got to play against type as a hitchhiker.Andrews also starred in a readers' theater production in January of Tennessee Williams' "Orpheus Descending" at TheatreNOW. His bucket list of roles he'd like to play include Big Daddy in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and George in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"